Oracle asks judge to find Google guilty of stealing Java

Oracle for over six years has been involved in a legal battle with Google over intellectual property theft of the Java programming language by the search engine giant. It has been asking the court system to fine Google over $9 billion for the theft.

Two months ago the courts found that Google’s use of Java was considered “fair use” and closed the case, but as we predicted back in May, that isn’t stopping the database giant from pressing on.

According to Silicon Valley, it looks like the database giant is not ready to hang its boots yet. On July 6, Oracle filed a motion in San Francisco U.S. District Court with the same judge that threw the decision out back in May, to chuck the verdict.

Oracle referred to the case law suggesting use is not legal if the user “exclusively acquires conspicuous financial rewards” from its use of the copyrighted material. Google, said Oracle, has earned more than $42 billion from Android. Therefore, Oracle is insisting that this isn’t actually fair use and is instead infringement.

The database giant wants the judge to stick to the narrower and more traditional applications of fair use, “for example when it is ‘criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching … scholarship, or research.’”

Google has consistently argued that the Java code was free and open to all and that its use of the code was transformative.

During the recent case, Google argued that Sun Microsystems, which created Java in the 1990s long before it was bought by Oracle, had no problem with Google using the code without a license.

“We didn’t pay for the free and open things,” Larry Page, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, testified during the trial.